By assuming that the utopian world of infinite feedback loops is so efficient that it transcends politics, the proponents of algorithmic regulation fall into the same trap as the technocrats of the past. Yes, these systems are terrifyingly efficient – in the same way that Singapore is terrifyingly efficient (O'Reilly, unsurprisingly, praises Singapore for its embrace of algorithmic regulation). And while Singapore's leaders might believe that they, too, have transcended politics, it doesn't mean that their regime cannot be assessed outside the linguistic swamp of efficiency and innovation – by using political, not economic benchmarks.

As Silicon Valley keeps corrupting our language with its endless glorification of disruption and efficiency – concepts at odds with the vocabulary of democracy – our ability to question the "how" of politics is weakened. Silicon Valley's default answer to the how of politics is what I call solutionism: problems are to be dealt with via apps, sensors, and feedback loops – all provided by startups. Earlier this year Google's Eric Schmidt even promised that startups would provide the solution to the problem of economic inequality: the latter, it seems, can also be "disrupted". And where the innovators and the disruptors lead, the bureaucrats follow.

The intelligence services embraced solutionism before other government agencies. Thus, they reduced the topic of terrorism from a subject that had some connection to history and foreign policy to an informational problem of identifying emerging terrorist threats via constant surveillance. They urged citizens to accept that instability is part of the game, that its root causes are neither traceable nor reparable, that the threat can only be pre-empted by out-innovating and out-surveilling the enemy with better communications.http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...mic-regulation

The numerous possibilities that tracking devices offer to health and insurance industries are not lost on O'Reilly. "You know the way that advertising turned out to be the native business model for the internet?" he wondered at a recent conference. "I think that insurance is going to be the native business model for the internet of things." Things do seem to be heading that way: in June, Microsoft struck a deal with American Family Insurance, the eighth-largest home insurer in the US, in which both companies will fund startups that want to put sensors into smart homes and smart cars for the purposes of "proactive protection".

In shifting the focus of regulation from reining in institutional and corporate malfeasance to perpetual electronic guidance of individuals, algorithmic regulation offers us a good-old technocratic utopia of politics without politics. Disagreement and conflict, under this model, are seen as unfortunate byproducts of the analog era – to be solved through data collection – and not as inevitable results of economic or ideological conflicts.

However, a politics without politics does not mean a politics without control or administration. As O'Reilly writes in his essay: "New technologies make it possible to reduce the amount of regulation while actually increasing the amount of oversight and production of desirable outcomes." Thus, it's a mistake to think that Silicon Valley wants to rid us of government institutions. Its dream state is not the small government of libertarians – a small state, after all, needs neither fancy gadgets nor massive servers to process the data – but the data-obsessed and data-obese state of behavioural economists.

To his credit, MacBride understood all of this in 1967. "Given the resources of modern technology and planning techniques," he warned, "it is really no great trick to transform even a country like ours into a smoothly running corporation where every detail of life is a mechanical function to be taken care of." MacBride's fear is O'Reilly's master plan: the government, he writes, ought to be modelled on the "lean startup" approach of Silicon Valley, which is "using data to constantly revise and tune its approach to the market". It's this very approach that Facebook has recently deployed to maximise user engagement on the site: if showing users more happy stories does the trick, so be it.

Earlier this year Google's Eric Schmidt even promised that startups would provide the solution to the problem of economic inequality: the latter, it seems, can also be "disrupted". And where the innovators and the disruptors lead, the bureaucrats follow.

I have more faith in math than politics. Of course, any "disruptions" would be political.